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Statement of FLOC to the 10th International Meeting in Defense of ILO Conventions and in Defense of the Independence of Workers' Organizations

Statement presented by Paul Germanotta, FLOC European Support Committee, to the June 15th meeting in Geneva.

The boycott and organizing campaign against Mt. Olive Pickle Co. in North Carolina by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee of Toledo, Ohio began in March 1999. It is now more than four years old, and it is still going strong.

The boycott has the active support of labor, community, student, religious, and political organizations across the United States. More than 100 retail supermarkets nationwide have honored the boycott by removing Mt. Olive pickles from their shelves.

By FLOC's own standards, four years is not a long time for a union boycott. FLOC first developed its boycott strategy in the late 1970s, when it began an 8-year campaign against Campbell Soup, a multinational tomato processing company. This campaign took a long time, but it was successful. It resulted in multi-party collective agreements that have brought substantial improvements in the working and living conditions of farmworkers in the U.S. Midwest.

FLOC has always had to rely on unconventional organizing strategies, since in the U.S., collective bargaining rights under federal labor legislation are denied to agricultural workers.

Like Mt. Olive, Campbell Soup is not the direct employer of the farmworkers who harvest the crops that are supplied to it for processing. And just as Mt. Olive is now attempting to do, Campbell Soup was able, for a long time, to hide behind the veil of the formal and legal relations of production in the industry.

However, the fact is, these companies both control the economics of their sectors of the industry. They dictate the terms of the supply contracts that are signed by the individual growers who employ agricultural workers to pick their crops.

Mt. Olive is not a multinational. However, it buys some of its raw materials -- fresh pickling and partially processed cucumbers and peppers -- from a number of suppliers in other countries, including India, Greece, and Honduras.

The farmworkers in those countries are exploited even more than the workers in the U.S. South. FLOC therefore considers that solidarity with those workers must be developed and maintained, since they have become part of a global community of workers who are exploited by an increasingly common set of corporate interests.

Once FLOC succeeds in forcing Mt. Olive to the bargaining table, it will demand that the collective agreement include an international labor security clause. This clause will require that Mt. Olive unilaterally provide the same wage increase, in percentage terms, for the workers of any of its suppliers in any country worldwide, as that which it agrees to provide for the workers employed by the pickle growers in North Carolina.

FLOC will also negotiate a code of conduct, which will require all Mt. Olive suppliers, in any country, to commit to observing ILO core principles on labor rights. FLOC will demand that the company finance an appropriate monitoring mechanism to ensure that the code is effectively applied in practice.

This strategy of contractual enforcement of the norms of international law and of employer obligations under national labor legislation is not intended to serve as a substitute for the effective enforcement by government of those norms and obligations.

However, the fact is that in the U.S. and in many other countries, agricultural workers do not have collective labor rights protected by public laws, and what rights do exist are poorly enforced, in part, because of under-funded government inspection agencies.

FLOC is very active in campaigning for the ratification by the U.S. government of the core ILO conventions, and for the strict enforcement by the government of those rights and protections that do exist. It is also actively campaigning for the reform of national immigration laws, so that employers will no longer be able to intimidate agricultural workers, many of whom are immigrant workers from Mexico, Guatemala, and other countries in the region, and to suppress their union activities by exploiting their immigrant status.

FLOC conveys it solidarity to the brothers and sisters participating in this, the 10th International Meeting in Defense of ILO Conventions and in Defense of the Independence of Workers' Organizations. It pledges its full support for an international strategy for the defense of workers' rights, including the rights of agricultural and immigrant workers, and for the promotion of international norms that are embodied in the framework of ILO conventions.

Please visit FLOC’s website at www.floc.com.